Twenty.

Keeping with tradition, I made my own birthday cake, except this time it was for both my friend and I (who share the same birthday!). We both follow @beta5chocolates on instagram, and were enamored by their epic cream puff cake:

A post shared by BETA5 (@beta5chocolates) on Jun 7, 2015 at 10:14pm PDT

So beautiful.

And I thought, wrongly, that it’d be easy to recreate it… well, I didn’t have hemisphere molds which is what I’m pretty sure they use to make their cream puffs all the same size and beautifully rounded, and I also didn’t have acetate which is needed for the mousse portion of the cake.

I know, excuses, excuses…

After my cream puffs came out as a literal flop, I half gave up as I was assembling the cake…

…which turned out quite messy, with filling all over the place, crumby, and uneven cake layers… I mean, the beta5 cake? Who’m I kidding.

(#nailedit)

My only hope was that powdered sugar. It’s always powdered sugar to the rescue.

The flavour profile of the cake is pretty classic; the concept came together pretty quickly after I figured out that I wanted to fill the puffs with an earl grey pastry cream. Components of the cake:

To my surprise, it actually tasted pretty good. The sponge cake layers were a tad overbaked, and the craquelin was no longer crunchy the next day, but the star of the cake was def the lemon filling contrasting with the fresh berries, and the earl grey pastry cream. Numi makes my favourite earl grey, so I used 3 of those tea bags to be steeped in the cream.

It made my day when I overheard some ladies walking by us as we were eating– “my god, that looks delicious”– under their breath :’)

Nothing better than a whole load of joy in the form of cream, sugar, and cake to blunt the reality of turning twenty, aka actually entering adulthood… yay 🙂